Cloud storage nowadays has become one of the convenient ways of data storage and data sharing. There are various vendors that offer cloud storage services like web hosting besides providing scalable infrastructure for better performance. Amazon's cloud services include Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), the Amazon cloud drive. Similarly Microsoft has its own cloud storage services like Sky Drive, Windows Azure and similar such services.
However there are a few major challenges faced by end customers in existing cloud storage services. One of the major challenges is that there is no way for a cloud storage service provider to directly migrate customer data to another cloud storage service provider. If a service goes down, the hosting company must return the data to its customer, who then must find another provider or revert back to storing it locally. This is because the API's are specific for each vendor. Moreover there are no rules and regulations for data deletion. Further the financial aspects related to each of the cloud storage offered to end-customers are different for each vendor.
In the state of art there have been attempts to check performance and conformance testing while deploying solutions on the cloud storage. One of the prior art discloses about the SNIA standards and illustrates on how “capabilities” gets implemented. However there have been rare attempts for compliance testing as proposed in the invention.
For resolving these challenges, Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA) has come up with cloud standard APIs known as Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) which helps client in moving data from one cloud vendor to another cloud vendor without the pain of recoding to different interfaces. With this standard way of billing and using CDMI, a customer can compare capabilities of different Cloud storage's vendors. SNIA has a technical working group (TWG) for developing these standards.
CDMI needs to be implemented by the cloud vendors as a separate module for enabling the invention as described in the detailed description. However there is no such existing technology that assists a CDMI enabled cloud vendor to perform compliance testing of CDMI module implemented by the storage server. Thus a need for developing an automated test suite for CDMI specification exists.
Enterprises using API-based vendor proprietary cloud storage solutions face a challenge of vendor lock-in owing to diverse and vendor-specific solutions. It is therefore imperative to adopt industry-standard-interface CDMI-based solutions, which facilitate interoperability between cloud storage solutions through vendor neutrality. Since, CDMI-based specifications offer multiple Cloud storage use cases such as Cloud-to-Cloud migration, and also provide a functional application interface to create, retrieve, update, and delete data elements from the Cloud, it is worthwhile to introduce a solution that for which the CDMI specification forms a base and depending upon it compliance testing of data within a cloud computing environment is performed.
In the light of the above mentioned challenges a need is exists for a comprehensive solution that perform the compliance testing of CDMI module implemented by the Storage Server.